Issue date: 3/4/04 Section: News

Volunteers douse a fire Wednesday morning at the Texas Engineering Extension Service´s fire fields for the spring training convention. Attendance for the convention includes 330 volunteer firefighters who will learn methods for extinguishing fires. (Photo by Sharon Aesbach / The Battalion)

With the sound of a beeping pager, suddenly their lives change. They are volunteer firefighters, ordinary individuals who race into burning infernos to save people they may have never even met. This week, many of these volunteer firefighters, as well as their full-time counterparts, are on the Texas A&M campus for the 16th annual spring fire training school.

All week, men and women from Texas, to the United Kingdom are reporting to the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) training fields, all trying to learn to save lives.
Deloss Edwards, a training instructor, said he has seen the fire training school grow over the years to what it is today.

"I've been training guys here for 28 years, but I'm just a rookie," Edwards said. "There's a couple guys that have been here a year or two more than me."

Edwards said in the early years he would arrive a few days before classes and help paint the shelters, mow the grass and set out the hoses. He said the school has changed drastically since then.

The 120-acre training site now boasts 132 life-size training props, various covered outdoor classrooms and a $70 million "disaster city" complex.

From a derailed gas tanker to a crashed helicopter and a burning chemical plant, the students are given hands-on training.

"Coming to this school has been an asset to me," said Donny Williams, a volunteer firefighter from Navasota. "We do some amount of training in my hometown, but we can't actually go out and practice first hand in the field like over here. It's given me great confidence in what I do."
Vernon Rerich, a volunteer firefighter from Weimar, Texas, said the world is consistently changing and one must be prepared.

"We just put out an enormous fire on this building," Rerich said, "and I think after lunch there's a pretty big chemical fire we are going to get after. With the world changing like it is, you just never know what might happen, and I can't get this kind of training anywhere else."

Continued...

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